The concept of ‘smart’ cities relates to the use of digital technologies to enhance a city's performance and overall well-being, to reduce its costs and resource consumption, and to engage it more effectively and actively with its citizens. Advances in telecommunications, combined with electronic and digital systems, have ‘compressed’ time and space, allowing increasingly rapid rates of global interchange, effectively connecting billions of people worldwide. These exchanges within virtual environments have primarily empowered individuals globally through the use of virtual private networks (VPN), intranets, or even the World Wide Web as a whole.
As an example, today our lives are defined by the interaction between two worlds: the physical and the virtual one. The latter, where the Internet has knitted the World Wide Web as a parallel world built-up from scratch, as gradually every single piece of information and activity that could be undertaken in the physical world, has been inputted in a mirrored-virtual one, making it reachable and available to all those with proper technological access. Through social networking, people have discovered and experienced the openness and accessibility to meet and interact with pairs globally, within the virtual world by enabling instant connection (‘compressing’ time) regardless of physical location (‘compressing’ space), thereby trespassing all borders, from cultural, economic, political and/or of the physical geographical type, amongst others. Nonetheless, according to 2014 statistics, more than 60% of the world population still has no access to the Internet; moreover, it is unevenly distributed.
Today, virtual communication schemes have developed in private and semi-private virtual environments, connecting family, friends and companies around the world, through the use of social networks and videoconferencing software platforms. Although the virtual world has extensively expanded and qualitatively evolved along the past 20 years, there is still an undisputable dependency and subordination to its physical equivalent, as virtual technologies are enrooted within physical environments (i.e. undersea internet cable global network) and enabled within physical devices (i.e. a smartphone, tablets). We are physical beings living in physical worlds.
In this regards, digital video-communication schemes (such as video-conference platforms, social networks, etc.) have a common denominator in that the perceptible live video-feeds are constrained to that of the size of the device being used (i.e. laptops, smartphone, tablet, etc.). Typically, such schemes have digitally captured physically realities in ‘compressed’ dimensions, reduced to 1:0.1, 1:0.2 scales (amongst many other possible combinations), where ‘1’ represents the real dimension scale of the physical world (full human-body dimensional scale) and ‘0.1’, ‘0.2’ represents the virtual reality scale, according to the digital device where the video feed is streamed. Thus, the communication message focuses on the figure of the interlocutors, while there is little or no context (physical background) awareness. These very same devices that enable the connection are the ones that define its limitations.
In any act of communication, verbal and non-verbal signs produce meaning, which lead to the creation of social relationships, systems of knowledge and thus cultural identity. Humans are able to communicate verbally and non-verbally. We use language in verbal communication and signs, symbols, sound or paralinguistic means to communicate a message. Humans respond to cultural identities, and the process of communication takes place intrinsically within this cultural orientation. Conceptually, central to any communication process appears the message that is encoded within a certain context; and it is sometimes the same context the one that influences and characterizes the decoding of the message, extending it beyond linguistic signs and gestures. With this regards and as mentioned, when performing any type of virtual communications, today live video feeds are scaled to the dimensions of the device used, whether a laptop, TV-display, tablet or cell phone, for instance. Thus, there is little or no perceptible indication of the surrounding context and/or location, and no indication as to, for instance, the city or even the country interlocutors are speaking to and from, which further generates a clear disconnection from the physical context and background, while discharging the presence of social and cultural indicators in the shaping of a message.